Sunday, February 01, 2004

Today is Super Bowl XXXVIII Sunday in Houston and I am in Houston too. I've managed to retain the name of one of the teams that will play in Reliant Center this afternoon. I like Super Bowl Sundays because they are so quiet. Few cars on the roads, few folks outside and many fewer sounds. No one is out blasting with leaf blowers or driving with amplified rap. I love the quiet of Super Bowl Sundays.

Today, I will work on "Shoreline" - the newly titled series now in the works for "Women On The Verge Of Something Else", our group exhibition at FotoFest opening on March 13, 2004. The solidness of squares is providing the structure for this series of nine photo collages that will form a tick-tack-toe quilt of images. These images are now emerging from the piled chaos of hundreds of photos, test strips and random pieces of paper in a room the cats can no longer enter. The door is always closed because the nine 22 x 22 inch squares of Arches paper lay in a grid on the floor, holding the photos and scraps of images that will coalesce in due time when I've looked at them long enough with 'soft eyes'. A photo collage takes form when I look - without focusing - at the shapes of each scrap and how each relates to all the others. There are no step-by-step instructions - just the looking with soft eyes, moving one scrap away and replacing it with another. Always, there is the dark hour when no collage holds. The images have no inherent relationship to one another. Despair overtakes the process. Every photo is pushed aside, back into piled chaos. A brisk walk around the block and chocolate can dissipate despair. Then, a new beginning. One by one photos and scraps are placed side-by-side and examined with very soft eyes until there is a 'whole'. A 'whole' collage is always unexpected, serendipitous, a surprise that leaves me with feelings of pleasure tinged with gentle subversiveness. Why should this mishmash hold together - but it does.

May nine 'wholes' hold to make "Shoreline". And across town at Reliant Stadium, may the better team win. And more on professional sports and the patriarchy later.

So, just when will Americans see that our current administration really is lying, spinning and moving with great speed toward a very different America than the one that we profess to love? I'm talking about the America whose freedoms and civil rights we've so taken for granted that they appear unchanging or unchangeable? Well, things are changing daily, incrementally and if we do not tune in for a day, we miss witnessing one more affront, one more assault on the values and liberties we've been born and bred to believe are unassailable. I 'm scared. What is it that blinds so many of us? Is it the malls where we can lose ourselves in background music and goods made in Third World countries, professional sports ("Give them bread and circuses."), the illusion of power given us with SUVs, Hummers and snow mobiles, cell phones, Palm Pilots and pagers or the day to day struggle and overwork that leave no time for civic engagement? Please link to: